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World of Warcraft wtf?

So, not only do you have to buy the actual game for $50, you also have to pay $12 a month just to play it. So for 6 months, you will actually shell out $122 dollars. Maybe my logic is flawed, but that is a lot of beer money!! Yea.... I don't think I will be getting WOW unless its REALLY REALLY worth it. All I can say is that a $122 game better be pretty damn good. Anyone played it yet? I havent seen any posts about it.

i can see the need for an mmorpg. i mean, didnt evercrack have like 12 expansions? that wasn't because it was a dust in the corner game. it was extremely popular and it cost per month. the last game i played online that didnt require a fee was Diablo 2 LOD. but that wasn't considered mmorpg. you could only have like 8 or so people in one game. im getting this game for christmas, and i hope it lives up to the hype. one of my friends who was an EQ addict. he bought both EQ2 and WoW, and has EQ2 on the shelf. He plays WoW only now and says its awesome. so it must be half way decent.

I have a couple friends who are obsessed with the game, and one of them bought the special edition game that comes with the 10-day free pass for a guest. He gave me the pass, and I must say that the game is very cool. I'm not a big fan of RPG's, but the enveloping world that WoW offers is intriguing. The other cool thing is that it is capable of having literally more than a thousand people on a particular server at once - my friends played on a couple with like 1,500 when the game was in beta. That's unprecendented in scale as far as I know for any online game.

I don't know if I'll be paying for a subscription, though. I agree that its a lot of money - for a year you're looking at $230 including the price of the game. That's an awful lot for any game, though if you can get into WoW you may not find yourself playing any other game and hence it would take the place of the other games that you might have bought throughout the year anyway.

I still thin maybe they should charge like 50$ a year at most. I mean xbox live costs that much and they have updates and things and its for more than one game they make so much money off those monthly fees that its rediculous, but people will pay it so why wouldent they do it?

Having 1500 people on one server isnt unusual for MMOs. DAoC has around 10 US servers with the more populated servers having around 1800. The populations are usually higher, but since WoW and EQ2 came out, it cut the populations by nearly 1/2.

Gamespot gave WoW a 9.5, which is the highest I have ever seen them give to any game. Must be one hell of a game. So I guess Blizzard can charge whatever they want for it, people will pay. I read somewhere that 200,000 accounts got created so far. Supposedly you get the first month free so you can try it, but you still have to buy the game to create an account... Those anuses!

GTPanzer, with a MMO you're not as much just paying for the game, you're paying for a service. The bandwidth, the servers, the constant policing for cheaters, fixing the exploits, etc, costs a metric buttload of money. That's what you really pay for.

As was said, some servers have close to 2000 people on them. If you just sent the coordinates of everyone in the area to everyone else, even that would add up to serious bandwidth. Add the NPCs, objects drawn by everyone else, etc, and you're talking some _tremendous_ bandwidth. You're never gonna run that on flatrate DSL, you know.

Also we're not talking a "server" as in "someone's old k6, in a basement." You have to do AI (at the very least least pathfinding) for tens of thousands of bots, you have to track all those players, and you have to seriously filter and compress the data so you don't need direct ethernet connections to each client. It's a whole bloody server farm. That costs too.

Etc.

I'm not gonna say they don't make a profit too out of that service. They do. But they can never offer it for free, either.

By comparison Diablo II was a peer-to-peer game. The actual server was hosted on your PC when you chose to create one. Blizzard itself never ran more than a matchmaking service on their own server. Most likely had buggerall costs for that, and even those were acceptable as basically an anti-piracy measure.

Ditto for, say, the original Phantasy Star Online which was even more literally peer-to-peer. If you were in a group of 4, all 4 consoles would be partially client and partially server. Again, Sega originally never ran more than a match-making service.

So again, in a real MMO you really pay for a service.

Is that service worth paying for? That's up to you to decide. For some people it is, for some people it isn't. MMOs aren't everyone's thing (not mine either), but then no game genre is. So you decide. Pay up, or don't, it's up to you.

But, no offense, no matter how many people rant about "*******s" and monthly prices, it still won't ever come for free. Because it can't. It's like asking that the local taxi company starts transporting people for free: rant all you want, it still just won't happen.